At last year's San Diego Comic Con, Image Comics had a memorable panel featuring many of comics' top creators, including industry legend Howard Chaykin. Image Publisher Eric Stepheson and his guests announced several upcoming high profile titles, and as plans for Satellite Sam -- a collaboration between Matt Fraction and Chaykin -- were discussed, Chaykin and Stephenson also teased a forthcoming new solo project from the celebrated writer and artist.

That project is now ready to be revealed, as Image Comics has announced Century West, a new original graphic novel written and illustrated by Chaykin. An exploration of the American West, cinema, and the birth of the modern world, it's a story the creator says has been on his mind "since the early 1990s," and one he promises will feature "cowboys, Indians, airplanes and a Passover seder."ComicsAlliance reached out to Chaykin, who described the book to us as follows:

"CENTURY WEST is one of the projects that's been in my concept book since the early 1990s -- a narrative demonstration of my conviction that the modern world began a lot earlier than any of us mid 20th century types ever knew -- and the movies were what made that modernity concrete, inviolable and inevitable. And of course, it's got cowboys, Indians, airplanes and a Passover seder, for Christ sake. What more could you ask for?"

Through a career that's spanned nearly four decades, and with work on titles like The Shadow, American Century and Star*Reach, Chaykin's efforts have had a profound influence on many of the most popular creators currently working in the industry. His innovative storytelling is perhaps best seen in its purest form in American Flagg, his groundbreaking 1980s series that stands with Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns as one of the seminal comics stories of its era.

Century West arrives in stores this September.

CENTURY WEST OGN

Story / Art / Cover by HOWARD CHAYKIN
SEPTEMBER 11

64 PAGES / Full Color / Mature

$7.99

Century, Texas used to be a sleepy little burg, barely a whistlestop between nowhere and the great beyond...until the 20th Century arrived with a bang, bringing with it automobiles, aeroplanes, telephones, paved streets...and, of course, the movies.Howard Chaykin tells the colorful story of the American West, transformed from frontier to legend, and how the American dream became a modern myth.

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